


Sleep, Child, Sleep

by nightmaresinwintah



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And Then He Doesn't, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Blood, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Death is an Asshole, Gore, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Seriously tho, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Violence, ahaahaha, but then he doesn't, but they're also Death so they can do what they want, dark!fic, it gives u hope and then tears it away, it hurts, it's sad, no happy ending, not a fix-it fic, woohoo!, x2 ahahahaa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 01:52:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15985073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmaresinwintah/pseuds/nightmaresinwintah
Summary: The first time he does something recklessly stupid and nearly gets himself killed in this strange new future, no one questions him for it. Sure, he gets a few looks, maybe people thinking was that necessary? But he’s Captain America. He’s a living legend. No one knows him, no one knows if this is normal for him, no one knows if he just does that kind of thing because he can.(Steve Rogers is Sad and Tired and aches for Death)





	Sleep, Child, Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> HEED THE TAGS!!! PLEASE!!!
> 
> Okay so hahaa hiiii welcome to the bad, no-good, sad-times horrible fic inspired by [this edit](http://bloodbuzzedohio.tumblr.com/post/177993451505/never-start-something-youre-not-willing-to) by [bloodbuzzedohio](http://bloodbuzzedohio.tumblr.com) on tumblr. I saw the edit, nearly cried, then [Hatif by Ross Daly](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KNzESiVSn-M) came on and that was it. I sat down and wrote and then [gracelesso](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracelesso/pseuds/gracelesso) looked over it for me and gave a few pointers and it was great and I am forever in debt! (Especially because of the help she's already given with my Stucky AU BB fic wheeeewwww)
> 
> Title from [S.O.S d'un terrien en déstresse](ysbgsongs.blogspot.com/2012/10/sos-dun-terrien-en-detresse-1978-daniel.html).

The first time he does something recklessly stupid and nearly gets himself killed in this strange new future, no one questions him for it. Sure, he gets a few looks, maybe people thinking was that necessary? But he’s Captain America. He’s a living legend. No one knows him, no one knows if this is normal for him, no one knows if he just does that kind of thing because he can. 

The second time he nearly dies on the battlefield, it’s after the Battle of New York. The Avengers, the people he’s been slowly getting to know, take notice. They say nothing. Why would they? It’s Captain Steve Rogers, the man out of time, the guy who sits broodily at the breakfast table and pushes his food around like it tastes like ash in his mouth. 

The third time, Tony pulls him up on it. Tony catches him alone after the fight, blood in his teeth and something wary in his eyes. Captain America laughs it off, shrugs, says; “what’s the point in a body that can’t die if you can’t risk it for the safety of others?” Tony doesn’t know what to say to that; he’s been prepared to die for others more than once. He nearly has. It’s just—he’s not so sure this is what this is. 

The fourth time, he’s jumping out of a plane into the dark ocean below without a parachute. After the mission, Nat barely has time to call him on it before he’s storming away to talk to Fury about how shady the mission was. Afterwards, he avoids her like the plague. She’s a good spy, but not even she can make Steve talk if he doesn’t want to. 

It’s something everyone avoids talking about; Captain America isn’t someone who would take every chance to off himself, right? He’s the symbol of all that’s good and true in America, the hero, the myth, the Man with a Plan. A man like that wouldn’t throw himself into battle and think, well, if I don’t come out of it, that’s ideal. 

It’s something the Avengers, slowly edging under the welded iron-and-nails shield Steve has over himself, think about a lot. Steve Rogers has a death wish, they realise. Steve Rogers is not okay. Steve Rogers is taking every chance to off himself, because if he dies in battle, it’s not like he  _ chose  _ to die, right? 

It’s the fifth time it happens that Steve nearly gets his wish. 

It’s the fifth time it happens that he really wishes it had happened, because— _ God.  _ Bucky’s alive, but he’s not—he’s not quite  _ Bucky,  _ he’s been captured and tortured and twisted into something not quite right, not quite human, and the worst part is that Bucky’s  _ still in there  _ and he’s suffering and Steve wakes up in that fucking hospital bed and the first thing he thinks is;  _ why won’t I die? _

He almost wants to get down onto his knees and pray to a God he barely believes in anymore to take his life. He’s too much of a coward to actively off himself. Fuck, but he’s tried. He’s sat in his bathtub with a knife pressed to his forearms, he’s lain on his apartment floor with a gun in his mouth, he’s gone out and bought dozens of bottles of pills from several different pharmacies and stared at them for hours, not able to swallow a single one. 

It’s the fifth time it happens that someone actively tries to make him talk. 

“Hey man, I know you’re not keen on the whole talking thing, but aside from the Winter Soldier being your long-lost best bud, how’re you holding up?” Sam asks him. 

Steve turns his head away and tries to climb out of the hospital bed. Sam yells at him to sit his ass back down, and it’s half because Steve owes the guy and half the searing pain in his ribs that makes him. He lays back down with a drawn-out sigh and refrains from bashing the back of his skull against the wall. 

“Sam, don’t make me do this,” he rasps. 

Sam looks affronted, and a little sad. “I ain’t  _ makin’  _ you do nothin’, Steve. Just, you’ve got some  _ serious  _ issues, like, way above my paygrade, but I thought maybe talking to a friend would help.”

Steve grits his teeth and curls his hands into fists. The ache in his still-healing knuckles distracts him from the intrusive, desperate need to scream. “Talking,” he says instead, all the bitterness seeping into the word. “Last time I talked about... _ this,  _ it was in confession. I did my penance, I repented, and then spent the next week thinking about how easy it would be to let a stray bullet catch me in the head, because after  _ talking  _ about it, all I could do was  _ think  _ about it.”

He’s immediately horrified with himself, wants to scrape the words back out of the air and shove them down his throat. Wants to choke them back down and let them sit like acid in his stomach. To his credit, Sam doesn’t even blink. 

“So not thinking about it helps?” he asks. 

Steve near  _ whimpers,  _ because no matter what he does, he can’t not think about it. It’s just—nice, sometimes, to pretend. It’s easier to do that when he doesn’t talk. He doesn’t reply to Sam, instead clams up and draws the sheet of metal and ice back over him, rebuilds his walls, and shuts the hell up. 

The sixth time it happens, he’s deep in a HYDRA base that’s very clearly been gutted by someone looking to make their torturers pay. It’s a bloodbath, things that were maybe once people painting the walls, the floor. He adds the contents of his stomach to it all, forces himself to practically  _ wade  _ through it, till he finds what he’s looking for. 

The computers are all smashed, the Chair is broken to pieces, and there is nothing left to salvage. No information can be taken from the computers, even with Nat trying. Steve stands in the centre of the room and stares at what was once the Chair. He tries to imagine it; the volts stripping away who he is. He wonders, like a stab to the chest, if he’s anything like he once was. What is there left for the Chair to take?

A noise—amazingly, not everyone is dead. Pale, shaking, missing half his jaw, a HYDRA goon shoots from the doorway. The crack of the gun has Natasha acting quick; she shoots him down the moment a second bullet leaves the goon’s gun. Steve watches as if in slow motion; his shield hangs limp at his side. 

It misses his heart by millimeters. He has to suffer Natasha dragging his traitorous body through the remains of others, all the way up to the extraction point, all the while cursing his name and everything that he is. Steve can’t help but agree with her. He tries to die; he does, he closes his eyes as she presses bandages to the hole in his chest and begs for Death to come collect him. 

Death, as ever, laughs from the other side of the quinjet and disappears the moment the bullet is out. His body heals the wound in just a couple of days, not even a scar left to show how close he was to dying. 

He has to see a  _ therapist.  _ She’s kind; sweet even. He never says a word when he sits in the room with her, leaves the moment the clock ticks over an hour. He’s banned from active duty, told to man up and get his problems sorted before he can go and look for what might be left of Bucky again. He barely holds back from screaming in everyone’s face. Instead of destroying everything and everyone in the room like he wants to, he gives them all a curt nod and disappears. He doesn’t leave his apartment except for the daily sessions with his therapist. 

One day, she asks him; “are you afraid of Death?” 

The question startles him. She’s been going through several prompts, never giving up. This is the first time he’s felt present in the room; he usually stays deep in his head and thinks about where Bucky might be right now. If he’s even Bucky. 

“You think I’m scared of Death?” he bites, the words sounding like they’re coming from someone else. He stares at her, confused and bewildered. She inclines her head. He chokes on a dark, humorless laugh. “I have done it a hundred times. I’m fucking  _ great  _ at it. Why would I be scared of something that, for some  _ infuriating  _ reason, never seems to stick?” 

“You’re angry you can’t stay dead?” she asks. 

He shuts up, clenches his jaw, and returns to staring at the wall behind her head. His mind is turning in circles and he wants to fucking cry but he  _ can’t  _ and he thinks;  _ oh God, why didn’t you let me stay in the ice? Why did you let me live past childhood? I was supposed to die. I am supposed to be dead. You gave me so many chances to die, why, oh why did none of them work? _

The seventh time is when the accords come into play and he’s suited up, to no one's delight. Even he feels wrong in the suit, now. Before, it meant he was finally going to have an outlet for everything that roils and writhes inside him. Now, it’s back to meaning he’s playing a dancing monkey. 

He gets to Bucky before anyone else does, says; “you remember me?” Bucky, because it  _ is  _ Bucky, God, fuck, he’s alive, it’s him, it’s really him. If Bucky can come through all of that and still be even a glimpse of what he once was, maybe...maybe Steve could, too? 

They have to run before any kind of talking happens. Bucky’s taken into custody and Steve politely refrains from burning the building to the ground and breathing in the smoke of the governments smouldering bodies. When the trigger words are spoken—because that’s what they are, they turned him into a dog who is compelled to fucking  _ comply  _ when its master commands it to—Steve wishes Death upon the world he died to save. 

It’s the first time he’s thought that dying for all these people wasn’t worth it. It leaves him feeling...empty. He died for nothing. He fights the Winter Soldier, because the other option is letting him kill Captain America, and that means  _ for sure  _ that Bucky would have no chance against these people. 

When the helicopter blades fly at him, he only ducks at the last second. He relishes the  _ teaser  _ of Death on his tongue, rolls it in his mouth, curses himself when he rolls out of the way. Later, he thinks about how quick, how  _ easy  _ it would have been to just let them slice through him, cut him open and leave him nothing but a rotting body that wasn’t supposed to be able to die. It’s almost a  _ challenge,  _ now. Can he kill the unkillable body they gave him? 

After everything is said and done, and Bucky’s on ice in Wakanda, Steve sits alone in the room T’Challa gave him and really, seriously sits and thinks about why he’s still here. Before, he’d thought he was here because the other option was not fighting for the world, that he’d be giving his enemies a fighting chance. 

Now, he doesn’t think he cares about even that. The world owes  _ him,  _ the world means nothing to him. He wants desperately to call in his paycheck. He wants to fling himself into the arms of Death by any means possible and let them caress his face, his neck, his chest. He wants to feel himself rot and decay under their touch, wants this body to disintegrate into  _ nothing.  _

He curses this body, curses every instance that brought Death so  _ tantalisingly  _ close and then tugged them away at the last moment. 

He carries on living, despite his wishes. He checks in on Bucky, goes out and fights the fight he wants no part in. He visits Bucky, when he gets off the ice. He watches as the triggers are gently pulled from Bucky’s mind, watches Bucky break down and cry when the words are spoken to him but have no effect. 

He hugs Bucky back when he runs to him, tucks his face into the crook of his neck. He doesn’t cry, but...he feels something in his chest give. He’s confused, at first. Then he recognises it;  _ purpose.  _ He wants to see Bucky get the life he deserves. The first tear he’s shed in years slips from an eye and he breathes in Bucky’s scent. He doesn’t let go for a long,  _ long  _ time. 

In between missions, Steve spends his time with Bucky at the farm he works on. He watches him learn to smile more, watches him figure out how to live with one arm. Watches him grow to love touch, watches him seek it out and laugh when Steve blushes something awful when Bucky kisses him for the first time. 

Steve watches—no, he  _ feels  _ himself start to thaw. Finally. After all these years out of the ice, water begins to drip from his frozen, Deathless body and he starts to feel warm. He starts to smile. He starts to kiss Bucky back, starts talking to him about the years out of the ice, starts asking questions about Bucky, about where he’s at. 

Bucky sees a therapist, too. He mentions Steve seeing one, once, and Steve has to leave for a while. When he comes back, feeling petty and childish, Bucky just takes his hand and sits him down. 

“I know what it’s like to want to die, Steve,” he says. 

Steve clenches his jaw and very carefully says nothing. Of course Bucky’s seen through him; he knows him inside out, can read him like a goddamn book. Steve had left out any mention of the times he’d nearly died, of the craving that sits low in his gut like a dormant plague, waiting for the moment he  _ really  _ loses it all and finally offs himself. Of course Bucky had sniffed it out anyway. 

“Steve,” Bucky murmurs. “Steve, I am not scared of Death. I have died, fuck,  _ countless  _ times. I’ve looked Death in the eye and they’ve look back and  _ laughed,  _ and here I am. Living. Sometimes I still don’t want to be. But Steve— _ Steve,”  _ and he’s reaching out and tilting Steve’s face so he’s looking him in the eye. “There’s a reason we’re still living. I’m falling in love with Life again, okay? And, fuck, it’s so beautiful, it’s so  _ glorious.  _ I wanna share it with you, Steve. Will you let me?” 

Steve wants to tell him yes, wants to collapse into his arms and seek out a therapist and wants to  _ want  _ to get better, but he doesn’t. He nods, but it’s weak, and Bucky’s face crumples. Steve says; “I’m sorry.”

Bucky says; “it’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay. Baby steps, yeah?” 

And Steve holds him tight and—and he wants to want to get better. He does. Baby steps, like Bucky said. He starts taking moments to appreciate little things; Bucky’s smile, a bright yellow flowers, the kindness Shuri shows Bucky. It feels like it’s working, and he comes home to Bucky whenever he can and he starts telling him about his day, picking out things that he enjoyed about it. 

He cries a lot. 

They have just gotten a list of therapists ready when Thanos comes. The ensuing battles feel like they take years, but time away from Bucky always feels longer than it is. When Steve meets him in the city, Bucky looks  _ beautiful,  _ and he bites his tongue and tries not to cry when he hugs him. They have a war to fight,  _ another fucking war _ , and Bucky’s got another fucking arm and they don’t deserve this, do they? This is not their world. But...it’s their people, now. Their goddamn family. 

Steve takes a deep breath and Bucky’s words ring in his ears; “a semi-stable 100 year old man.” He holds those words close to his chest, right next to  _ I’m with you till the end of the line  _ and  _ I love you.  _ Because Bucky’s speaking for both of them, and he’s doing so well, and Steve doesn’t want to fight but he runs into the carnage like it’s what he breathes for, because  _ that’s what he does.  _

The eighth time Steve Rogers does something recklessly stupid and nearly gets himself killed in this strange future, he’s reaching for the gun that’s fallen from Bucky’s hands with  _ “Steve?”  _ still ringing in his ears and he’s screaming, he’s pretty sure he’s screaming, and Bucky’s ashes, whatever’s left of him, are still on his fingers and he’s got the gun in his mouth and he’s pulling the trigger and—  

Thor’s knocking it out of his hands and the bullets hit the trees around them and Steve’s throwing blind punches, hitting at him, screaming at him, screaming at Death, begging for them to come and take him “ _ please, please, fuck, please, why why why why please, why won’t you take me? It’s all I want, it’s all I need, please, fuck, just fucking let me die, please!”  _

Because it’s not fair. It’s just not fucking fair. He sobs and begs and pleads and he’s so angry, he’s  _ so furious,  _ because Death has taken Bucky from him  _ again,  _ and it’s left him behind in this fucking  _ unkillable  _ body  _ again _ , and it’s  _ not fair.  _ He had just started to feel hope that he would maybe not  _ ache  _ for Death everyday, and now everything has been ripped away from him. 

It takes him a long time to calm down. The calm that comes to him is nothing but dull numbness. Everyone is mourning, everyone is suffering and he kneels beside what’s left of Bucky and repeats like a mantra in his head;  _ please  _ and  _ why.  _

He swears to himself and all and anything listening that there will be no ninth time, only a last time. The next time Death comes teasingly close, snarl curling at their lips, dangling themselves in front of Steve, he’s going to grab hold and he’s not going to let go until they  _ finally  _ take him. 

He swears to himself that the next time Death comes close, he is going to die. 

The last time comes slower than he’d thought, but it comes sure enough. Death grins at him from the cliff at Vormir, sly and teeth dripping with blood and venom. Steve thinks;  _ if I die here, Bucky lives. If I die here, Bucky will have to live with the fact that I died to save him, and the knowledge that I have wanted to die for a very long time.  _

He stands at the cliff of Vormir and faces Tony Stark and sees his own thoughts reflected in his eyes. Steve thinks;  _ oh, God, no. I don’t want to die.  _

The last time Death offers themselves to him in this strange future, he doesn’t want to take their hand. It’s the first time he hasn’t been brought to his knees, begging  _ yes yes please take me.  _ It’s the first time he doesn’t want to die, and it’s the first time that he really has to. He looks at Tony, despair bleeding from them both, and opens his mouth. 

He says; “tell Bucky I didn’t want to. Tell him...tell him— _ God,  _ fuck, tell him I love him, that I didn’t want to die this time, that I  _ had  _ to. Please.” He doesn’t know what’s worse; Bucky knowing that he truly didn’t want to die this time around, or thinking that he had welcomed Death with open arms. 

And Tony says; “Steve…”

But Steve’s shaking his head; no. It has to be him. Tony looks away, struggling, tears wet on his cheeks. Steve takes a deep breath and looks to the sky of another world. He doesn’t even get to die on his own planet. He spits a bitter, shaky laugh, and turns back to the cliff. 

The last time Death comes creeping, Steve takes their hand. Their touch is warm, not cold like he was expecting. It hurts. It fucking hurts, more than the ice, more than any bullet, more that finding out Bucky was still alive, more than learning what they did to him. It hurts more than thawing, more than watching Bucky die  _ again.  _ It hurts more than learning that Bucky is still alive, that for him to be brought home...Steve would have to die. 

It hurts until it’s all he knows, and then when he thinks he can’t stand it anymore, everything stops. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> okay yeah 
> 
> follow me/yell at me on tumblr @ [buckyskillingme](http://buckyskillingme.tumblr.com)


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